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"New research: Human bipedality a result of the need to carry large amounts of food?"
Our Ancestors Started Walking on Two Legs to Carry Food: Research
They say necessity is the mother of invention and, when it comes to evolution, this may be certainly true. Why did human ancestors evolve to walk upright? The reason may be a simple one: to carry armfuls of food in times of scarcity and ferocious competence. At least this is what an international team of scientists suggest in a paper published today in the journal Current Biology.
The researchers, from universities in Portugal, the UK, USA and Japan, have studied chimpanzees in Bossou Forest in Guinea, west Africa, to find that ‘wild chimpanzees walk bipedally more often and carry more items when transporting valuable, unpredictable resources to less–competitive places,’ according to the study.
This finding suggests that human ancestors might have developed upright walking for similar reasons. ‘Bipedality as the key human adaptation may be an evolutionary product of this strategy persisting over time,’ says Professor William McGrew, from the Department of archaeology and anthropology at the University of Cambridge. ‘Ultimately, it set our ancestors on a separate evolutionary path.’
We can think of many reasons for our ancestors to start walking on two legs, but actually this one seems quite plausible: Are we talking about rivalry and greediness in our early ancestors? I’m in.
Source: Daily Mail, The Independent
Photo: stock.xchng
Carvalho, S., Biro, D., Cunha, E., Hockings, K., McGrew, W., Richmond, B., & Matsuzawa, T. (2012). Chimpanzee carrying behaviour and the origins of human bipedality Current Biology, 22 (6) DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.01.052
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